The De Blasio Moment

Two months ago, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio was every New York City liberal’s favorite underdog—or, at least, he would have been, if they had heard of him. Now he is the presumptive next mayor of America’s largest city.

De Blasio has not yet officially won any actual prize. He trounced his opponents in Tuesday’s Democratic mayoral primary, but he needed more than forty per cent of the vote to avoid a runoff election against former City Comptroller Bill Thompson, and as of Wednesday morning he was floating just above that number, too close to it for anyone to be comfortable calling the race. Most likely, that will not happen until next week, when all the paper ballots have been tallied. Still, it is not too early to presume, with some reservations, that de Blasio will be sworn in to succeed Michael Bloomberg next year.

It is still theoretically possible that Thompson could win a runoff, even though he lost to de Blasio by fourteen points on Tuesday. But it is very unlikely. It is tempting to think that a runoff campaign would mimic the more fiercely tribal New York of old, that the election would be fought along racial lines, with Thompson, who is black, cast as David Dinkins. But it’s not so simple now. De Blasio is married to a black woman; his rise was propelled, in part, by the strength of his son’s Afro, which was on display in a political ad. According to exit polling, Thompson and de Blasio split the city’s African-American vote neatly, with each man capturing forty-two per cent. (According to the same exit polls, Thompson won black men by thirteen points, 49-36, but de Blasio won black women 47-37. The margin of error is plus or minus four points.)

De Blasio has been caricatured as the candidate of the city’s current version of the limousine liberal: the Park Slope yuppie. That is not completely unfair, as de Blasio showed on Tuesday night, when in lieu of the typical hotel ballroom victory celebration, his campaign staged a block party in Brooklyn that came complete with a food truck serving lobster rolls. But it is an entirely inaccurate picture of where his support actually came from. He won handily over all five boroughs. The New York Times’s map of the results by precinct was colored in de Blasio blue; the pockets of support for Thompson, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, and Comptroller John Liu are places where someone spilled some paint. In the exit polling, there are only six categories in which de Blasio did not win an outright plurality. He tied Thompson among all African-Americans, lost African-American males to him, and lost by the narrowest of margins among moderates, people who support the N.Y.P.D.’s controversial stop-and-frisk program, and the fourteen per cent of Democratic voters who said that the most important issue in the country’s safest big city is crime. He lost people of “all other races,” which was essentially the pollsters’ category for Asian-Americans, to Liu. That was it.

Whoever prevails in the runoff, if there is one, will next have to face Republican nominee Joe Lhota, who was a deputy mayor in the Giuliani administration and most recently served as the head of the M.T.A. But barring a collapse of Weineresque proportions, that should not be too much trouble for either de Blasio or Thompson. There are murmurs that the city’s richest are spooked by de Blasio’s liberal rhetoric, that they will turn to Lhota for protection and a continuation of Bloomberg’s good times. But de Blasio is not so all-encompassingly liberal as his detractors—and some of his supporters—might think. As John Cassidy pointed out, de Blasio is, like Bloomberg, generally pro-development, someone who understands that an American city is ultimately only as solid as its tax base. But even if members of the city’s élite do rally around Lhota, Tuesday’s vote suggests that they may have less influence in elections here than is often supposed. One-time frontrunner Quinn’s base was in New York’s wealthiest areas, but she saw her candidacy collapse. Besides, Giuliani and Bloomberg won because they were men for their times. Joe Lhota is not that. Judging by the strength of his support throughout the city, Bill de Blasio just might be.

Photograph by Mario Tama/Getty.

Alex Koppelman was a politics editor for newyorker.com from from 2011 to 2013.